The Single Story

How to create a single story- show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power (the ability to not just tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person)

Palestinian poet writes, "if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with secondly." Start with the arrows of the Native Americans and not with the arrival of the British. And you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

All of these stories make me who I am, but to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me.

The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete; they make one story become the only story.

Engage with all stories, not just the negative ones.

The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.